Tag: Airwave

Recently we had a new site come up that only needed one access point. It’s a small doctors office that we are renting space in so one of our doctors can use it every other Wednesday.

There was some confusion of how the network was going to be installed and it ended up that we had to install all our own gear instead of using a VPN from their gear. Property managers… meh.

Since the site was only in use once every 2 weeks, we installed everything but didn’t have a cable run for the access point (AP215). It was estimated that the signal coverage would be good enough coming from the IT closet. It was confirmed with an AirCheck in the patient rooms. After the first couple of weeks that the practice was open, the staff decided that the AP was not in a good location and proceeded to move it to their liking instead of calling us. Then of course, we started getting complaints about how it was installed and where it was. Great. I’d love to go push their EKG machines around the office and hide it in a broom closet somewhere claiming that it worked better.

This brought up a new topic with our manager about our monitoring of APs and where the alerts are going. We hadn’t set up any monitoring for the APs because usually I’d end up in the controller once a day or so and if I saw one go down I’d look into it. Either that or I’d get a ticket about crappy coverage. It also brought concerns about the possibility of people stealing our APs. I was tasked to setup alerts so we’d get a notice every time certain APs went down.

So on to Airwave. I had setup an Airwave server (Device management and monitoring from Aruba Networks if you aren’t familiar) to monitor the new Aruba system that we are installing. I’ve got a thousand permanent licenses and 2500 eval licenses to play with. So I ended up adding all our current Juniper APs as well as the new Arubas that are going in. I’ll pull all the Junipers out when the aruba system is live.

Triggering from Airwave is quite easy. Go to the “System” tab at the top and then “Triggers”:

Click Add and you’ll end up here:

Since I was only worried about APs that went down, I chose the “Device down” type. There are a couple different options here that I left default. I’ve also read some advanced threads about triggering where more advanced options can be use to really dive into configuration alerts, etc. Nothing I need right now but good to keep in mind.

The main purpose of my trigger was to receive an email when an AP goes down so I created a group for “Monitored APs” (under the Groups tab) and checked the email notification button. This opened another set of options:

The sender address is the email you want the message to come from. Initially this confused me because I thought we’d have to get Sys Admins to create an exchange account and then setup all this crap just to get it to work. Wrong. Airwave has a built in SMTP service. You can literally just pick some email address to type in and thats what it will use as the sender. I wouldn’t suggest using your CEO’s email address but I had toyed with the notion of using BigBrother@WhiteHouse.gov just for kicks.

Fill out the addresses you want the notifications to be sent to and you are ready to go.

One note… the “Suppress Until Acknowledged” means you will only receive 1 email and it won’t send another notice about the AP/device until you go into Alerts and click “Acknowledge”. This will reset the status and send the email again when its necessary. I turned it off because for now I’m not Acknowledging any of the alerts. I may change it later but a lot of the time I need to be bugged in order to keep stuff on my mind. Other the other hand, if an AP is bouncing, it would probably send me an email every 3-5 minutes. That would get on my nerves. I’ll fix it if needed.

Once you are finished with all your options, click add and its active right away. Now just pick some of the devices or APs that you want to monitor and add them to the Monitored APs group.